K2 blackpearl 4.6.5 now available

Friday, May 3, 2013

Holly A.

Hi there — I'm Holly Anderson, one of the Product Marketing Managers here at K2. Our team, along with the Product Management team, is responsible for knowing the ins and outs of the K2 platform and while we do occasionally have to open up Visual Studio to build a demo, we're mostly focused on taking all that technical knowledge and extracting the stuff that's important to the K2 community. So, starting today, you'll be seeing regular posts from us about topics ranging from new and upcoming features and capabilities to cool things you can do with the K2 platform. We're always looking for topics to write about, so if you have suggestions for us — let us know!

We'll kick things off by talking a little bit about K2 blackpearl 4.6.5, which was released today and is available for download on the K2 Partner and Customer Portal.

This minor update includes performance and stability enhancements, enhancements to existing functionality, like our Exchange integration and SmartActions capabilities, as well as a couple of new features I'd like to highlight.

K2 blackpearl 4.6.5 introduces some new extensibility features that make it easier to add custom functionality to your K2 business applications without the need to write a lot of code.

First up is our new SmartWizard framework, which will allow you to quickly add new custom wizards to your K2 designers by using declarative XML against K2 SmartObjects. The new framework will also be used internally to build any new wizards included in the product going forward. The new CRM 2011 wizards included in the 4.6.5 release are the first to use the SmartWizard framework, and more will be coming later this year.

The other new extensibility feature I'd like to highlight is the new Endpoint service broker, which allows you to integrate your K2 applications with any system via Web Services, WCF Endpoints and .NET assemblies. With support for complex types using serialization objects, this out-of-the-box broker will give you more integration options than ever before.

To wrap up, the final feature I want to mention is our support for SharePoint 2013 running in SharePoint 2010 mode. This allows those of you who built K2 applications in SharePoint 2010 to continue using those applications after upgrading to SharePoint 2013, as long as you're utilizing SharePoint 2010 mode. We know some of you have specific questions about our SharePoint 2013 support, so we'll be focusing entirely on that topic in our next post, coming up in a few days.

This was just a quick look into some of the new features we released today, so if you'd like to get more details, take a look at the release notes and make sure to plan on updating your K2 environment to get access to these great new features.